Hughes was one of around 80,000 British and Hessian soldiers who served in the American Revolutionary War between 1775 and 1783. The American environment – its physical terrain, flora, fauna, weather, climate, and diseases – proved hugely detrimental to their physical and mental health. They were not the first European soldiers to discover that a war in America was also a war against the natural world. Into the swampOf all the environmental challenges that British and Hessian soldiers endured during the war, the continent’s flora and fauna elicited some of the strongest complaints. Vaughn Scribner is Associate Professor of British American History at the University of Central Arkansas.